BaseHealth at Bridge to PopHealth East
Like many health systems, Banner Health needed a better way to predict who within its insurance population are in danger of becoming acutely ill in the coming year. The traditional approach assumes that the same 5% of the population who generated the most utilization and cost in one year will be the same 5% in the following year. However, after detailed analysis, that assumption has been proven wrong. Banner, and all health systems, need to be able to find the ‘new 5%’ — those patients who do not have long, complicated claims histories and who look relatively healthy on paper, but are actually at risk for a major health issue.
What’s more, we know that health systems are increasingly being asked to do more with less. There are limited intervention resources and budget available to care for patient populations, and it is critical to be as efficient as possible with these limited resources. Banner Health approached this problem with a specific goal to develop a new method for identifying the best use of each available healthcare dollar. By partnering with BaseHealth, Banner was able to reach its goal with a new approach to predictive analytics that identifies those patients with impending health crises, allowing care teams to target addressable risk factors for specific high-risk patients that will benefit most from clinical and programmatic interventions.
Targeting its Medicare Advantage (MA) population to start, Banner is using BaseHealth analytics to find at-risk patients more quickly than traditional analysis. Michael Parris, the former Senior Director of Business Intelligence and Data Analytics at Banner Health and now the new Vice President of Data Integration at Texas Health Resources, led the initiative at Banner Health saying, “This [approach] gives us a much better way to actually target the right patient that I can do an intervention on.” He added, “It gives us not just who’s going to get sick, but what and why they are at risk.”
The BaseHealth technology provides visualization and other front-end facing software interfaces to pinpoint the exact nature of a condition, such as blood pressure, family history, or age, leading to the prediction of future illness. Various case management staff, including PharmDs and social workers, is intervening with the identified so-called ‘invisible patients’ to have them actively monitored on risk factors such as blood pressure and high cholesterol.
Banner Health and BaseHealth will be presenting on this topic on May 14th and 15th in Boston at the Bridge to PopHealth East Conference, sharing how this new approach to analytics uncovered Banner’s biggest opportunity to bend the cost curve. Michael Parris will join Dan Hoemke, BaseHealth’s Chief Business Officer to present on Tuesday the 15th at 3:05PM on how these joint efforts have fundamentally changed the way Banner goes about caring for its at-risk member populations.
